Microsoft Office 2013, formally unveiled on Monday, embraces the cloud more fully than any previous version of the age-old productivity suite. We’ve already examined the desktop versions of the programs at some length, but they aren’t the only apps that picked up new features—Office Web Apps, the browser-based versions of Office’s major components, are also available from Microsoft for customers to preview.

The current versions of the Web Apps are available to users of SkyDrive, Office 365, and SharePoint, where they’re used both as Office document viewers and feature-light document editors. When we last looked at them, we found them to be far and away the best way to view Office documents on the Web without losing any formatting, but they contained such a small subset of the desktop apps’ editing features that in almost all cases you’d have to use them in tandem with the desktop versions of Office rather than as a standalone cloud office suite like Google Drive or Zoho Docs.

The 2013 Web Apps add a few things and remove a few restrictions, but are they enough to replace the desktop apps or alter how you’d use the Web Apps in a production environment?

As you can see in the Word Web App, the look of the Office Web Apps has been adjusted to match the Metro-esque stylings of the desktop versions, including the very white Ribbon with its all-caps tabs and flat, gradient-less colors. A status bar across the bottom of the window displays additional information like word count, language, and whether anyone else has the document open.

The Office Web App's new File menu is quite Metro-esque.

In addition to the basic Home and Insert tabs it already had, Word has picked up a Page Layout tab which allows for basic adjustments to margins, orientation, paper size, indentations, and line spacing, and the new “Paragraph” addition to the right-click menu will also give you access to those settings.

Word count, language, Track Changes status, and other messages are displayed in the lower left-hand corner.

While it’s not quite a new feature per se, the Word editor is a bit less limited in the types of documents it would open. For instance, the 2010 version would refuse to even open a document with Track Changes enabled in the editor. The 2013 version will open it for editing, and “Track Changes: On” will appear in the lower status bar even though you can’t actually see the changes or turn it off. The notification is subtle, so you might want to be careful about this—if Track Changes is enabled in a document you change in the Word Web App, anyone who downloads and opens it can see the edits you made.

Excel

The Excel Web App’s changes are mostly visual—its one new feature since the 2010 version is the ability to insert forms. The Excel Web App continues to be able to edit things (like pivot tables) created in the desktop versions of the software without actually being able to create new ones itself. Other features (like data validation) are still MIA—in the case of data validation in particular, the Excel 2010 Web App wouldn’t even view the affected workbook without making a copy of it first, while Excel 2013 could view it but still would have had to make a copy of it to switch into edit mode.

One subtle but appreciated difference I noticed in my time with the new Excel Web App was that the graphs it made were much cleaner than the ones made by the 2010 version. See below:

Some of the graphs made by the Excel 2010 Web App exhibit some ugly, MS Paint-style aliasing.

The graphs made by the Excel 2013 Web App aren’t drastically different, but they are cleaner.

PowerPoint

Enlarge/ As in the desktop app, new PowerPoint decks created in the PowerPoint 2013 Web App are 16:9 rather than 4:3.

If you just want to use the PowerPoint Web App to view PowerPoint decks you’ve made in the desktop versions of the application, you’re in luck—the PowerPoint 2013 Web App displays markedly shaper text and images and much smoother animations than the 2010 version, so much so that if placed side-by-side with the desktop app, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were using the Web app or the locally installed version. It makes a huge difference.

Text displayed as intended in PowerPoint for Mac 2011.

The same text, rendered blurry by the PowerPoint 2010 Web App.

Sharper and more accurate rendering by the PowerPoint 2013 Web App.

The editor, likewise, shows a massive improvement over the 2010 version. While the latter can’t even be used to insert new text animations or slide transitions, the 2013 version can do both of those things plus add comments, shapes, and text boxes to boot.

Enlarge/ The PowerPoint 2010 Web App (top) versus the 2013 version. Note the new tabs for animations and transitions and the ability to create shapes.

The animation and transition options available are limited to rather simple fly-ins and fades, with an “existing” option also available to preserve animations created on the desktop that can’t be replicated in the Web app, but I’d argue that the paucity of options here is actually a good thing—one of the most annoying things about poorly done PowerPoint presentations is the use and overuse of the more ridiculous, time-consuming animations. In this case, I’m all for software-enforced restraint.

There are still missing features in the PowerPoint 2013 Web App—the desktop version can easily insert charts from Excel, create SmartArt and tables, and has many, many more templates to choose from—but its changes turn it from an app that was barely usable for its stated purpose into an app that could conceivably be used to make and display decent-looking PowerPoint decks by itself. It’s the biggest upgrade in the lineup by a fair amount.

I wonder how important real time collaboration really is beyond being a bullet point. We use some of it at my office, but its mostly for meeting notes and lists of things to do. Sometimes for phone screen interviews. Never for working on real documents. For our use cases etherpad is more than enough, but I know we're not everyone either.

i'm curious when (or maybe how) this version of outlook will be what goes to corporate exchange clients. When I log into my Outlook Web Access (OWA) I get a farily full functioned outlook 2003/2007 clone IF i'm in IE. Any other browser I get OWA Lite, which makes late 90's hotmail look like a powerful mail management client.

Andrew - speaking of which, are there any browser compatibility issues? What browser were you testing in?

i'm curious when (or maybe how) this version of outlook will be what goes to corporate exchange clients. When I log into my Outlook Web Access (OWA) I get a farily full functioned outlook 2003/2007 clone IF i'm in IE. Any other browser I get OWA Lite, which makes late 90's hotmail look like a powerful mail management client.

Andrew - speaking of which, are there any browser compatibility issues? What browser were you testing in?

I did the majority of my testing in Chrome, but I also checked things out in Firefox, IE, and the iPad's version of Safari (this was on both OS X and Windows where possible, as well as some brief poking around in Chrome for Android). Things could be flaky in other browsers in the 2010 web apps, but the 2013 versions don't seem to have issues.

FWIW I wasn't even given an option to use the lite version of OWA with the new web app, so it could be that it's getting phased out. It's hard to tell at this point since these are just previews.

I wonder how important real time collaboration really is beyond being a bullet point. We use some of it at my office, but its mostly for meeting notes and lists of things to do. Sometimes for phone screen interviews. Never for working on real documents. For our use cases etherpad is more than enough, but I know we're not everyone either.

Yeah it really depends on what you need it for. Here at Ars we use a Google spreadsheet to track the day's stories as they're written, edited, and scheduled, and real-time collaboration is key in such a scenario. If you're just keeping some shared notes or documentation or something up on a SharePoint server, it's considerably less important.

I've been using the old Outlook Web App (because of an as-yet undiagnosed configuration problem that doesn't let me use regular Outlook) and I find it pretty terrible. It's functional, in that I can do what I need to do. I think what I like least is how few emails I can see on the screen at once, since each is displayed as two lines with lots of white space between one message and the next. The screen cap of the new version shows it's now three lines of text. With the top dead space (maybe marginally reduced?) and browser chrome, on a 1440x900 display I can only see the most recent 10 emails. In the regular app, I can do one line per email and see 29. Another pet peeve is that if I drag from another mailbox, it leaves the email in both places, so I have to right-click Move to actually clean up after myself.

If you have universal access to all of your docs from any device at any time, why limit yourself to working only in a browser? I think a different way to think about this release of Office is that the rich client apps are a really killer "offline mode".

There were a handful of new Excel features, not just forms You might want to look at a workbook with named objects to see the new display in view mode, or the pivot table's field well. There is probably some official press release that shows all of the new stuff.

There were a handful of new Excel features, not just forms You might want to look at a workbook with named objects to see the new display in view mode, or the pivot table's field well. There is probably some official press release that shows all of the new stuff.

There are probably a few other new features that show themselves when you're working with documents with specific features (like Track Changes did in Word), but the point is you still need the desktop apps to create documents that use these features.

If you have universal access to all of your docs from any device at any time, why limit yourself to working only in a browser? I think a different way to think about this release of Office is that the rich client apps are a really killer "offline mode".

That's an interesting way of looking at it. One thing I could say (that I didn't say because this thing was already running long) is that the Office Web Apps are a great example of how rich browser-based applications could eventually completely replace fat applications sitting on your hard drive. I think Microsoft *could*, if it wanted, release a more-or-less complete version of Office that ran entirely in the browser, but didn't really change how the applications looked or worked or performed—imagine saying that a few years ago.

If you have universal access to all of your docs from any device at any time, why limit yourself to working only in a browser? I think a different way to think about this release of Office is that the rich client apps are a really killer "offline mode".

That's an interesting way of looking at it. One thing I could say (that I didn't say because this thing was already running long) is that the Office Web Apps are a great example of how rich browser-based applications could eventually completely replace fat applications sitting on your hard drive. I think Microsoft *could*, if it wanted, release a more-or-less complete version of Office that ran entirely in the browser, but didn't really change how the applications looked or worked or performed—imagine saying that a few years ago.

Ultimately, if you are running the application locally and just doing it through the browser, is it really any less fat than a locally installed application? You're taking advantage of the browser's rendering engine but the local application is taking advantage of the same resources from Windows. Meanwhile, I sure hope the browser application is doing more sandboxing and security -- I would expect a browser application with the same functionality is going to lag in terms of performance. We may reach the point where the amount of lag is irrelevant, but I don't think it's fair to call the local app "fat" at this point.

Alternatively, it's possible that much of the work is not being done on your system, and instead happening on a server. But in that case you get lag from the connection....

I don't know about the average user, but I absolutely detest those all-caps titles. In the Salt Lake Metropolitan Area, different municipalities have slightly differently-cased signs, and it is *far* easier to read mixed-case signs with reasonable bezel than the all-caps signs found at some intersections. I find the same to be true of GUIs.

I don't see the 2013 web app, only the older version. I have signed up for the Office 365, and I'm using the same account to open SkyDrive. Is there a config option that you have to enable or something?

I don't see the 2013 web app, only the older version. I have signed up for the Office 365, and I'm using the same account to open SkyDrive. Is there a config option that you have to enable or something?

I don't see the 2013 web app, only the older version. I have signed up for the Office 365, and I'm using the same account to open SkyDrive. Is there a config option that you have to enable or something?

Google docs style real time collaborative editing won't be easy to integrate. Google uses the operational transformation algorithm to do their magic, which requires each document to be defined as a series of editing operations on a single stream of data. Integrating that algorithm into the office codebase would amount to a near-total rewrite i suspect.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.